You can keep the tree bees, BYM. We had them last year- they took over the tits' nestboxes & the housemartin nest terrace that the wrens & robins like to use. Their frenetic buzzing drove me out of the study for several months as the housemartin "boxes" were just outside the window. I love most bees, but didn't like the tree bees!

This year happily we've had no tree bees, but are hearing lots of cuckoo calls. We have green & great spotted woodpeckers, song thrushes & mistle thrushes, long tailed, great & bluetits, nesting wrens, robins & blackbirds. The bluetits reclaimed one of the nestboxes & have fledged already.

There are buzzards in the area too. The "girls" aren't so keen on them!

I think HenGen would approve of our garden. Lovers of coiffured lawns on the other hand would NOT be amused

Last edited by Icemaiden on Wed Jun 06, 2018 10:59 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Chickens are a girl's best friend (though diamonds would be nice too!)

NB
Googled it. It's only lived here since 2001 which is why I'd never heard of it. Maybe once Brexit happens it will migrate back to Europe.
Hopefully though it will be an asset to our environment. If we could only get rid of mink and grey squirrels then all would be fine. Darn Americans! And here, hedgehogs.
PS
How do you get Imojis on this site?

Nice article in Birdwatching this month about a couple who bought a property and noticed that the field next door was used by a garden centre to grow wild flowers for the seed then the ground was left and they noticed Turtle Doves regularly coming down to feed on it. So they got in touch with the garden centre and a local grain farmer to provide feed and they are all now actively managing the land for Turtle Doves and got other other land owners involved in the area. Nice to have a good news story about ordinary folk doing their bit.

Yes, a while ago I happened to see a clip of some programme about a farmer with a proper farm who now just grew seed for bird feed. I hadn't thought about this before, about where all the different seeds actually came from in such quantities!

We have turtle doves here, I'd never seen one before, they are graceful and beautiful. Last night we came home from an evening meeting hosted by the British Ambassador (and there's a sentence I never thought I would write. It wasn't a glam thing, just an info session for ex-pats. No refreshments, no chocolates....). Anyway, although I was asleep, my OH saw something resembling a pine marten (although it sounded a bit large for one of those. Possibly a eucalyptus marten!) and a couple of nightjars in the road. We do hear them regularly in the summer with their churring.

My only encounter with a turtle dove was a bit unfortunate. I was crawling along the M26 towards the junction with the M25 on a Friday evening when the turtle dove landed on the road in front of my car. I couldn't safely get out of the car to shoo it out of the way, so I lined up to pass over it, two wheels safely on each side of it.

Just as the traffic sped up to oh... maybe 10mph & I went to pass over it, the dappy dove took flight. It bounced off my windscreen, hit my roof rack & disappeared into the kayak on my roof.

Not wanting to arrive in Wales in the pitch black & have to remove feathers & entrails from the inside of my boat, I stopped at Clacket Lane services, a mile or so further on. There, standing on the roof under my kayak was a tailless turtledove, looking rather the worse for wear.

I struggled to reach it to pick it up, & it flew off into a hedge never to be seen again.

I could only hope that it lived to tell the tale...

Chickens are a girl's best friend (though diamonds would be nice too!)

Well you did all you could, that's the main thing. I have been watching sparrow flying school out of the window, particularly one baby who seemed to think the idea was to flounder about in the flower bed, lose Mum, then spend an age craning his/her neck to find her, then flutter to the floor, and then out of my sight. I also hope he/she lived to tell the tale!